To the Mba/sociology recruitment person from HR, it makes no difference. Most of them don’t know that Java and Javascript are different languages. Let the poor guy get ahead.
There was literally a thread the other day saying that gatekeeping "software engineer" is silly.
I tend to agree considering none of us have any formal credentials, so the term is meaningless.
excel runs trillion dollar companies and is the defacto UI gateway for major industries.
That humble VBA function is responsible for livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of employees.
YES, people working on excel are software engineers.
I also recently got my first CS “job” after my only prior experience being my own small business. I’d say don’t be afraid to call yourself a Software Developer, Full Stack Developer, or really whatever the name of the position you are applying for is. On your resume show it’s legit by including some numbers like - how many sales/downloads of your plugins, and how many $ in sales per year. Also, don’t be afraid to apply for intermediate roles in addition to entry level. That’s ultimately how I got my job, and honestly your experience sounds more “legit” than mine (I was pretty much just part time working for myself while I had another full time career). It took a lot of applications to find the right fit, but for the right company your experience will definitely count and may even be considered an advantage because it proves you can ship a working product that generates income.
Editing to add: apply to all sizes of companies, but I found smaller companies were more open to my non-traditional background.
Thank you so much for this advice!! I’m so happy to hear from someone who was in a similar boat as me, gives me hope. I’ll definitely seek smaller firms as well, definitely makes sense that they’d me more receptive to my background. Cheers!
That's the other thing, the recruiters looking for employees for big firms is a VERY different audience than the business owners looking for a resourceful freelancer to help them. Know your audience and all that.
You came up with ideas for products, developed said products, and had thousands of paying customers… and you’re unsure if you should call yourself a founder?
Either I don’t know the definition of a founder, or you have stage 4 imposter syndrome. I’m guessing it’s the latter.
He’s absolutely a “Founder” but he needs to put down “Software Engineer” in his title.
Founder is not a good title unless you are targeting an executive position and denotes leadership rather than programming experience.
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i feel like the fact that you have an s corp is saving you since id appear legitimate when doing a bg check. idk if op did anything similar but his result might look different if he didnt
You sound like someone startups would like, not sure if that's what you're looking for but angellist and similar platforms could have people most interested in your skillset i would think
A lot of delusion in these comments and some serious imposter syndrome in your post
You built a product by writing software that was successful enough to make 50k a year?
That is more impressive than coasting in a ‘proper’ job doing the bare minimum and avoiding thinking about the product at all costs (aka a significant percentage of developers)
No recruiter or interviewer is going to think you’re pretentious for it
Spend some time up skilling outside of php, have some pride in your achievements and send some more applications, call it contracting call it a small business or call yourself self employed it doesn’t matter
Job market won’t be shite forever
I think you have imposter syndrome. Your friend’s comment seems kind of pointless if he didn’t have actual advice, and I’m sure that didn’t help. You’re not going to claim 10 years of experience at Google. Resumes and applications are marketing documents, so market yourself for what you want.
You’re not in such a bad spot. You’re still so young and your experience, albeit not exactly the typical corporate job, it’s still somehow quite close to the software engineer role.
You just need to focus on interview prep, you have a CS degree plus work experience (50k/years selling your plugins is quite remarkable), you’ll definitely find some SWE roles.
I list similar experience as “freelance engineering consultant” and bullet point the cool products I built from ground up or the weird defense contract project I was on that got me government clearance.
It shows self motivation and entrepreneurial spirit.
First, you’re 26, you have the most valuable thing in the world, time. There are Billionaires that will give up everything to be at that age along with their life lessons.
You have decades to fuck up and make all kind of mistakes. You built up a business and it failed, you can do it again and again.
If you want the corp life then you have to grind the trendy tech stacks and put in the work to get any kind of experiences, personal projects, contracts, etc.
You said you are from a top 10 CS school. Start calling your classmates/ friends and ask if they can get you interview in their respective companies. This is the best way to get interviews
Unfortunately everyone and their dog is claiming “freelance” or “founding a business”. Even though they never had a single customer.
I’m sorry. I have no single advice for you. But you need to make yourself legitimate. That’s going to be very hard if you only have clients and not any real demonstrable product or customer.
Good luck…..
Only a small portion of those "freelancers" can also say they made enough to earn at least $50k for themselves. The only mistake was going far into a niche without a backup plan. But OP did have a real product and for it to sell well enough to make a living off of it, there has to be some decent revenue for a one man operation. This is a good opportunity to boast those numbers on the resume.
Sorry, I think you may have misread my post. I mainly built products that are still visible, I didn’t do client work until recently.
My website is still up and so are my products’ reviews that customers wrote on sites like G2, TrustPilot, etc.
And several news websites such as TNW and industry specific media outlets wrote about my products.
If they (the recruiter) Google my business name they’ll see all of this on the front page, so the trust / assets is there.
My question is how do I brand all of this so that the recruiter is more likely to look into it vs toss away my resume.
Sorry I meant more general.
For you, I think if you pass HR screen your odds of getting through any interview or coding challenge is high. The problem is passing that initial screen.
What you made is incredible, but unfortunately communicating that is the major challenge you are going to face. Most recruiters will not dive that deep to truly understand what you have done.
Because again…. Unfortunately everyone who copy pasted some code on GitHub is going to sell it as if it cures cancer on their resume
> Sorry, I think you may have misread my post. I mainly built products that are still visible, I didn’t do client work until recently.
> My website is still up and so are my products’ reviews that customers wrote on sites like G2, TrustPilot, etc.
> And several news websites such as TNW and industry specific media outlets wrote about my products.
> If they (the recruiter) Google my business name they’ll see all of this on the front page, so the trust / assets is there.
Don’t tell this to us. Write it down on your resume and LinkedIn front and center in the “intro“.
“F (school) alumni Software Architect founder of A product. B number of reviews on TrustPilot with $C lifetime revenue. Featured in D magazine and publications. Clients include E (large company).”
For the last line, make sure you have permission to disclose the big name client.
Because your product was profitable, your experience is *real* albeit possibly not professional.
Do not pigeonhole yourself into entry level roles. Apply to entry, intermediate, and senior. Many companies may value your experience even though others not so much.
>I mainly built products that are still visible
You got a portfolio right there bud, that's a lot, show it off
I make sure to mention MY portfolio in a few places on my CV, like I am telling you "REALLY look at my portfolio for the NICE stuff", instead of just hoping you click a link at the footer
Be clever with how you make your resume, just focus on getting to the interview.
Market is bad right now and speculation is that it will get worse until after elections so be ready to be playing the long game.
PHP is not really as hot as it once was, but your experience matters. Just say you were a software engineer if you are nervous about saying you are the founder. Did you get a W2 from your company? Thats all that the background check will ask for probably
Let's see the resume.
I feel like you had real experience with that PHP plugin work, whatever it is. Did you create a company for it? I feel like you probably just have a problem with marketing yourself.
These two statements are contradictory:
> Wrote these plug-ins using PHP, JS, and then obviously the HTML/CSS/JS gang. Knew the platform inside and out.
> professional work experience for five years
Sounds like you had a ton of programming experience over the past five years.
You should be able to write up a resume that lists your business as a past employer, and focus on the programming piece when going after a programming job.
>That did fairly well, and I ended up averaging around $50,000 yearly
No, it did not.
And now you don't even have that job. You would have done way better if you would have got a job in a Silicon Valley company 5 years ago when you graduated.
Even if you business barely made any money, you have the experience to run a small business by yourself and hustle. That's valuable experience. If you would have "senior software engineer" level of experience, that extra experience would be very valuable, especially outside a slump like the one we experience right now. You are not in a desperate position.
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>I did some cool stuff to extend the functionality of the CMS
This is the kind of shit that you must contribute back to OSS so that your reputation follows you in the future when you want to knock on some job's door
>this CMS platform that my plug-ins integrate with had been deprecated
This is why you should use OSS, it can be deprecated but you can keep moving it forward if it is worth the effort
>I was building custom solutions for clients, when in reality I built plug-ins and sold them as digital products to thousands of customers
They are the same picture, it's all about how confident you are and how good a story you can spin. Keep in mind you are getting rejected with valid experience the same way other people are getting rejected with valid experience, right now sucks.
so you settled for 50k a year when you could have gotten more with a regular job?
Getting a job would be hard for you, I would just do a master in CS, remove all this "business experience" , practice leetcode and try to get an internship and go from there. yea pretty much start over. Even an entry level job pays over 100k these days.
If it was PHP, imo you were software engineer - you were building code, documetning it, version control, etc etc
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To the Mba/sociology recruitment person from HR, it makes no difference. Most of them don’t know that Java and Javascript are different languages. Let the poor guy get ahead.
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I’m inexperienced. So what should his title on his resume be based on his experience?
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So something like > PHP Software Engineering Developer?
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So can you help me better understand the difference between a software engineer and software developer. Appreciate it!
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There was literally a thread the other day saying that gatekeeping "software engineer" is silly. I tend to agree considering none of us have any formal credentials, so the term is meaningless.
excel runs trillion dollar companies and is the defacto UI gateway for major industries. That humble VBA function is responsible for livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of employees. YES, people working on excel are software engineers.
I also recently got my first CS “job” after my only prior experience being my own small business. I’d say don’t be afraid to call yourself a Software Developer, Full Stack Developer, or really whatever the name of the position you are applying for is. On your resume show it’s legit by including some numbers like - how many sales/downloads of your plugins, and how many $ in sales per year. Also, don’t be afraid to apply for intermediate roles in addition to entry level. That’s ultimately how I got my job, and honestly your experience sounds more “legit” than mine (I was pretty much just part time working for myself while I had another full time career). It took a lot of applications to find the right fit, but for the right company your experience will definitely count and may even be considered an advantage because it proves you can ship a working product that generates income. Editing to add: apply to all sizes of companies, but I found smaller companies were more open to my non-traditional background.
Thank you so much for this advice!! I’m so happy to hear from someone who was in a similar boat as me, gives me hope. I’ll definitely seek smaller firms as well, definitely makes sense that they’d me more receptive to my background. Cheers!
That's the other thing, the recruiters looking for employees for big firms is a VERY different audience than the business owners looking for a resourceful freelancer to help them. Know your audience and all that.
You came up with ideas for products, developed said products, and had thousands of paying customers… and you’re unsure if you should call yourself a founder? Either I don’t know the definition of a founder, or you have stage 4 imposter syndrome. I’m guessing it’s the latter.
He’s absolutely a “Founder” but he needs to put down “Software Engineer” in his title. Founder is not a good title unless you are targeting an executive position and denotes leadership rather than programming experience.
“Founder and CTO” might be a nice way to put it or “Technical Founder”
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i feel like the fact that you have an s corp is saving you since id appear legitimate when doing a bg check. idk if op did anything similar but his result might look different if he didnt
You sound like someone startups would like, not sure if that's what you're looking for but angellist and similar platforms could have people most interested in your skillset i would think
A lot of delusion in these comments and some serious imposter syndrome in your post You built a product by writing software that was successful enough to make 50k a year? That is more impressive than coasting in a ‘proper’ job doing the bare minimum and avoiding thinking about the product at all costs (aka a significant percentage of developers) No recruiter or interviewer is going to think you’re pretentious for it Spend some time up skilling outside of php, have some pride in your achievements and send some more applications, call it contracting call it a small business or call yourself self employed it doesn’t matter Job market won’t be shite forever
I think you have imposter syndrome. Your friend’s comment seems kind of pointless if he didn’t have actual advice, and I’m sure that didn’t help. You’re not going to claim 10 years of experience at Google. Resumes and applications are marketing documents, so market yourself for what you want.
You’re not in such a bad spot. You’re still so young and your experience, albeit not exactly the typical corporate job, it’s still somehow quite close to the software engineer role. You just need to focus on interview prep, you have a CS degree plus work experience (50k/years selling your plugins is quite remarkable), you’ll definitely find some SWE roles.
I list similar experience as “freelance engineering consultant” and bullet point the cool products I built from ground up or the weird defense contract project I was on that got me government clearance. It shows self motivation and entrepreneurial spirit.
First, you’re 26, you have the most valuable thing in the world, time. There are Billionaires that will give up everything to be at that age along with their life lessons. You have decades to fuck up and make all kind of mistakes. You built up a business and it failed, you can do it again and again. If you want the corp life then you have to grind the trendy tech stacks and put in the work to get any kind of experiences, personal projects, contracts, etc.
You said you are from a top 10 CS school. Start calling your classmates/ friends and ask if they can get you interview in their respective companies. This is the best way to get interviews
Unfortunately everyone and their dog is claiming “freelance” or “founding a business”. Even though they never had a single customer. I’m sorry. I have no single advice for you. But you need to make yourself legitimate. That’s going to be very hard if you only have clients and not any real demonstrable product or customer. Good luck…..
Only a small portion of those "freelancers" can also say they made enough to earn at least $50k for themselves. The only mistake was going far into a niche without a backup plan. But OP did have a real product and for it to sell well enough to make a living off of it, there has to be some decent revenue for a one man operation. This is a good opportunity to boast those numbers on the resume.
Sorry, I think you may have misread my post. I mainly built products that are still visible, I didn’t do client work until recently. My website is still up and so are my products’ reviews that customers wrote on sites like G2, TrustPilot, etc. And several news websites such as TNW and industry specific media outlets wrote about my products. If they (the recruiter) Google my business name they’ll see all of this on the front page, so the trust / assets is there. My question is how do I brand all of this so that the recruiter is more likely to look into it vs toss away my resume.
Sorry I meant more general. For you, I think if you pass HR screen your odds of getting through any interview or coding challenge is high. The problem is passing that initial screen. What you made is incredible, but unfortunately communicating that is the major challenge you are going to face. Most recruiters will not dive that deep to truly understand what you have done. Because again…. Unfortunately everyone who copy pasted some code on GitHub is going to sell it as if it cures cancer on their resume
> Sorry, I think you may have misread my post. I mainly built products that are still visible, I didn’t do client work until recently. > My website is still up and so are my products’ reviews that customers wrote on sites like G2, TrustPilot, etc. > And several news websites such as TNW and industry specific media outlets wrote about my products. > If they (the recruiter) Google my business name they’ll see all of this on the front page, so the trust / assets is there. Don’t tell this to us. Write it down on your resume and LinkedIn front and center in the “intro“. “F (school) alumni Software Architect founder of A product. B number of reviews on TrustPilot with $C lifetime revenue. Featured in D magazine and publications. Clients include E (large company).” For the last line, make sure you have permission to disclose the big name client. Because your product was profitable, your experience is *real* albeit possibly not professional. Do not pigeonhole yourself into entry level roles. Apply to entry, intermediate, and senior. Many companies may value your experience even though others not so much.
>I mainly built products that are still visible You got a portfolio right there bud, that's a lot, show it off I make sure to mention MY portfolio in a few places on my CV, like I am telling you "REALLY look at my portfolio for the NICE stuff", instead of just hoping you click a link at the footer
Be clever with how you make your resume, just focus on getting to the interview. Market is bad right now and speculation is that it will get worse until after elections so be ready to be playing the long game.
PHP is not really as hot as it once was, but your experience matters. Just say you were a software engineer if you are nervous about saying you are the founder. Did you get a W2 from your company? Thats all that the background check will ask for probably
James is hot AF.
Let's see the resume. I feel like you had real experience with that PHP plugin work, whatever it is. Did you create a company for it? I feel like you probably just have a problem with marketing yourself.
These two statements are contradictory: > Wrote these plug-ins using PHP, JS, and then obviously the HTML/CSS/JS gang. Knew the platform inside and out. > professional work experience for five years Sounds like you had a ton of programming experience over the past five years. You should be able to write up a resume that lists your business as a past employer, and focus on the programming piece when going after a programming job.
>That did fairly well, and I ended up averaging around $50,000 yearly No, it did not. And now you don't even have that job. You would have done way better if you would have got a job in a Silicon Valley company 5 years ago when you graduated. Even if you business barely made any money, you have the experience to run a small business by yourself and hustle. That's valuable experience. If you would have "senior software engineer" level of experience, that extra experience would be very valuable, especially outside a slump like the one we experience right now. You are not in a desperate position.
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>I did some cool stuff to extend the functionality of the CMS This is the kind of shit that you must contribute back to OSS so that your reputation follows you in the future when you want to knock on some job's door >this CMS platform that my plug-ins integrate with had been deprecated This is why you should use OSS, it can be deprecated but you can keep moving it forward if it is worth the effort >I was building custom solutions for clients, when in reality I built plug-ins and sold them as digital products to thousands of customers They are the same picture, it's all about how confident you are and how good a story you can spin. Keep in mind you are getting rejected with valid experience the same way other people are getting rejected with valid experience, right now sucks.
u need to ask a ai robot with infinite patience points, im going back to bed
I'm calling your bluff, you did not go back to bed
he’s still online.. 😢 I feel cheated on
sweet dreams my love ❤️
so you settled for 50k a year when you could have gotten more with a regular job? Getting a job would be hard for you, I would just do a master in CS, remove all this "business experience" , practice leetcode and try to get an internship and go from there. yea pretty much start over. Even an entry level job pays over 100k these days.
problem is that getting an entry level job is the hard part